So absent from that video is noting that the small black block on the motherboard, to the left / front of the MPX Card Slot, is the power outlet plug for twin 8 pin power cables.
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MP 7,1 Waiting for Mac Pro 7,1 A1991 (no more)
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So absent from that video is noting that the small black block on the motherboard, to the left / front of the MPX Card Slot, is the power outlet plug for twin 8 pin power cables.
This explains why Jony Ive and Cook were acting so weird around the new Mac Pro at WWDC.
https://www.macrumors.com/2019/07/01/jony-ive-dispirited-before-leaving-apple/
It almost seemed like both were seeing it for the very first time. The article mentions Ive’s difficulty with participating in any form of product development.
Again, I say it. MBA’s is why you are gonna spend $12000 for this setup. You are just paying for the nostalgia of the brand and a sense of when Steve Jobs/Jony Ive years.
https://www.macrumors.com/2019/07/01/jony-ive-dispirited-before-leaving-apple/
It almost seemed like both were seeing it for the very first time. The article mentions Ive’s difficulty with participating in any form of product development.
Again, I say it. MBA’s is why you are gonna spend $12000 for this setup. You are just paying for the nostalgia of the brand and a sense of when Steve Jobs/Jony Ive years.
I'd say Ive gone is a big loss for Apple, but that's just me.
I did wonder why the heck they looked so amazed looking at the mMP, it really looked like they had never seen it before.
I did wonder why the heck they looked so amazed looking at the mMP, it really looked like they had never seen it before.
Why wait a year to bitch about it ?
MPX modules suck right now, and the new MP hasn't even be released yet , or even use by anyone .
They will be silly expensive, offer less performance than comparable products, and will never be updated .
MPX modules don't have to used/bought with the new MP though, I assume , and the slots can still be used for more sensible components - I guess .
The real issue - to me - remains to be the pricing - the performance sweetspot will be the model one tier above the base model, probably will be 7k-8k .
And then there is the usual mandatory OSX upgrade , which is more likely to keep me from buying the posh MP than anything else .
That's where Apple really dropped the ball - backwards compatibility .
And you know all this how? Please, feel free to go in-depth, we're all waiting to hear.
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Yes, of course, it's completely, 100% useless...
Interesting link. Thanks.
Isn't it fair to presume that software for macOS/OSX made by Apple themselves would be highly optimized for their hardware and OS, whereas a third-party development house will be so-so with their optimizations? Especially when the third parties develop for both macOS/OSX and Windows? In other words, they have the home advantage.
Engadget is so morbidly ignorant yet somehow they are considered tech “intelligencia”. First they mis-claim that there are no power cable connectors when they are plainly visible on the motherboard. Second they “worry” that mpx slots will limit card options because they are proprietary while, apparently, misunderstanding you can use completely regular pci cards and ignore the mpx option.
The entire video is littered with blissful ignorance. While this might be forgiven if done the same day as the announcement, they have had weeks since the announcement to do even the most minimal research to not get so many facts wrong. Yet the blithering idiot in the video has this idiot smug face “teaching” all us lessor masses with his scorching ignorance. The sad thing is Gizmodo is even worse and I’ve permanently taken it off my bookmarks.
Painful.
Are standard off-the-shelf PC video cards functional, including the boot screen?
Apple always (prior to the 2019 Mac Pro) had their proprietary video card firmware and non-standarad EFI motherboard firmware.
Has this design policy now been changed?
We won't know until the machines ship for sure, but what I have heard is that off the shelf PC video cards will be completely supported.
I would be surprised if they were still using the old style firmware. All other Macs are on a newer firmware with support for PC Card boot time frame buffers.
I believe what he was saying is that installing MPX modules may limit what cards you can use in the other slots due to the lack of power connections (because they would be in use by the cards installed in the MPX slots).
In theory the newer firmwares Apple uses should support boot screens, but we don't know for sure because there hasn't been any Mac with PCIe slots and Apple's modern firmware. I think the modern firmware showed up around 2014 or 2015?
Basically in the time the Mac Pro has been asleep, Apple modernized their firmware in a way that _should_ work with off the shelf PC Cards, including boot screen. We just don't know for sure if they messed something up because there has been no Mac Pro with modern firmware to test with.
Even the firmware updates they did for the 2010 left those newer chunks out.
The older Mac Pros actually used a standard video card boot screen output, just the wrong standard. They used the UGA standard, which basically ended up being the draft standard. The final standard, GOP, is what PC video cards actually use. All current shipping Apple Macs support GOP as the boot screen standard.
Again, no one knows how compatible Apple's GOP implementation is because we haven't seen it in action on a Mac Pro. But it would be very strange indeed if for some reason they removed GOP on the Mac Pro. It would be especially odd given how much work they went through to support standard video cards on the hardware.
It's completely unbelievable to me that Apple would go back to the much older UGA boot screen standard on the new Mac Pro. It's been dead for 10 years.
it is probably not just GOP. Otherwise, the Mac Mini and eGPU could conceptually have boot screen support and it doesn't. Once TB bus set up and the GPU hanging off of a PCI-e link, GOP would be decoupled from working how?
The Mac Pro is probably going to boot in what is equivalent to UEFI Secure Boot where the drivers off the GPU card ROM will be checked for authentication. If don't have the public key associated with that signing in the EFI firmware data then it won't work so well.
Also the hooks and handoffs between Apple and macOS or "BootCamp" transition modes. [ Apple leaving behind their BIOS kludge may help also but folks wouldn't be able to run other OS's that needed it. ]
I haven't looked too much into eGPU. But, Thunderbolt devices are treated very differently from PCIe devices due to them being external. The system has a boot time trust process with Thunderbolt devices. It's possible that newer Macs both have implemented GOP properly, and won't talk to an eGPU at boot time because it's an untrusted device with memory access.
I don't think UEFI secure boot checks ROM's of attached devices. This also doesn't sound likely to me. In the Thunderbolt case it makes sense, but having boot time checking of PCIe devices seems less likely because there could be a wide range of possible devices.
If you're saying Apple would enforce that specifically on GPUs.... I mean it's not impossible. But it just sounds like a lot of trouble to make people unhappy. And again, off the shelf PC GPUs are supposed to be a supported feature.
Given this new Mac Pro has no physical case locking mechanism what so ever on the device. After a power-on the stuff in the slots is no more inherently trustworthy than a Thunderbolt device would be. From a security standpoint the "trustworthy" state is effectively the same.
I can possible see where there is no "plug/unplug" support or initialization timing issue.
It should.
"... the firmware checks the signature of each piece of boot software, including UEFI firmware drivers (also known as Option ROMs), EFI applications, and the operating system. If the signatures are valid, the PC boots, and the firmware gives control to the operating system. ..."
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/oem-secure-boot
Also a 2011 Presentation that AMD did ( a PDF file ). Slide 14 and 17-20.
The whole point of UEFI Secure Boot is to stop attack vectors in the preboot phase. Checking later after the factor is effectively checking after already opened up the barndarn and let anything in.
It isn't about GPUs specifically ( everything is suppose to be checked if in strict compliance with secure boot), but other folks could just be sloppy to make some users happy. UEFI and GOP can scope down to just one of the GPUs present and "do it right" and leave the other(s) that may be present to post boot. That could get tough if folks rip all of the GPUs that Apple's GPU has keys for out and slap in Bubba Gump GPU from the discount Fry's bargain bin that Apple doesn't have a public key for.
I think the notion that any completely random GPU in the Solar System is going to work is probably mis-setting expectations. It probably wouldn't be just the 3 on the current tech specs page, but "everything" probably isn't correct either.
The Thunderbolt lockdown is mostly around Thunderbolt also being your power source. A Thunderbolt device, pretending to be a charger, could attack your machine at boot time. Similar situation to iPhone chargers.
I would guess that ones that Apple has blessed so far from AMD will work, as will a decent subset of new AMD ones.
But I think that is mostly going to come down to drivers. There is a chance Apple has Apple-ified their GOP implementation, but I just don't see them trying to lock out third party GPUs. Especially after putting the hardware in place to support them.
If they really wanted to lock out third party GPUs they could have not included the power connectors and made MPX completely proprietary.
Here's a guy who attempted some estimates on comparable workstations to the base 2019 Mac Pro, with HP and Dell configs, and wasn't able to get these below the price of the base config MP:
I think PC GPUs will work fine in it. However, I don’t see a compelling reason to do so unless there are no future MPX GPUs released. The base GPU is decent and the Vega options are better than pretty much any PC card you can buy.
Did the sim on HP and in fact I got 6905$, down to 5524$, for the Z8 G4 like in the video.
No possible selection of the W 3223, but it goes for less than 800$
No possible selection of the W 3223, but it goes for less than 800$
I'll be interested to see if inserting an MPX card disables the 8 pin power feeds for that bay.
The solo Vega option is better than any AMD PC mainstream option, but "any card" is a bit of a stretch. Pragmatically, the drivers (and being available on macOS 10.15 and later ) are also necessary to establish a real context.
However, there is a very good chance the Pro Vega II options won't "a compelling reason" in that their cost will put them out of reach for many ( maybe most ) of the folks in the target user base. Apple has slapped a 100+% price increase on the base system price of the Mac Pro. If they apply the same to the historic BTO option prices on GPU upgrade options that these Vega II options will be some triple digit percentage increase also .
Apple doesn't particularly point it out in the tech specs but those cards also seem to have Infinity Fabric links on the edges ( so two MPX modules could be hooked together). That plus the large 7nm die and the large HBM2 memory is likely tp push the cost sky high. There is probably a HUGE price gap between the entry card and these Vegas. If Apple leaves completely empty of MPX modules then some 'classic" GPUs are going to fill the gap. Given Apple also needs 'classic' GPU cards to fill Thunderbolt PCI-e expansion roles as eGPUs for the rest of the line up, they probably are going to need to some certification (and development/enablement ) of some explicit list of cards.
The overlap with eGPU and Mac Pro is where it won't be surprising for them to not engage in too much redundant work ( i.e., try to match MPX modules with a large fraction of the eGPU certified list. ) . They need an entry MPX because the Mac Pro has to ship with something. And, like the Mac Pro relative to the rest of the Mac line up, they will put effort into some mega-margin solutions at the upper "3%" end. How they go about provisioning/enabling the middle will be telling of how engaged they plan to be in the future on this system.
The base card is only 'decent' in the context of doing mostly 2D GUI work ( just need a "console" screen for audio instruments ). For what is pragmatically charging for that entry card it isn't 'decent'. Mid range Navi wasn't ready early so they have an excuse, but they really need to 'fix' that over the next 12-16 months (even better if it is sooner). If they don't, I don't see why objective folks with long term production needs would trust them. It is not "OK" if Apple uses "there are open slots" as an excuse to go back into Rip van Winkle mode. Likewise for the stratosphere priced upper end GPU ... why pay a vendor who is very often asleep if current projected workloads are increasing over time. This Mac Pro system skews "max performance" GPU toward MPX. If Apple is asleep in 2-4 years then this base system will have problems for the future workloads.
For the Vega II modules, they physically cover them up. That can been seen in the pictures on the Mac Pro's Overview page. If the card is physically covering up the socket ... how is something going to plug in ? if something is in the bay and using power then why should that power be available elsewhere?
The entry half sized 580X MPX module may not cover it completely , up but if the full size ones do there is probably the same impact ( a shared power bus feeding them and one 'mode' is suppose to be used at a time). It isn't a standard 75W slot powered class GPU either. ( If this 580X is an up clocked 12nm Polaris pushed into service to fill a cap it will need some fraction of that second 8-pin source to power the module. ). Maybe in the future there would be an entry MPX module that only took 225W or less and maybe one of the 8-pin modules was there (if accessible), but that probably wouldn't make many folks 'happy' (and it is a complexity for number of folks to screw up).